🆕 UPDATED Glidegram - social media app (follow/unfollow, unread messages & more)

[Lisa]

Hi Gliders,

After several days of working through the kinks, I’m sharing my first public app, Glidegram!

Instagram

The Glide team has been so consistent with new features, I wanted to create a social media app using some, if not all, of the newest releases.

The app has the following features:

• Direct messaging (private chat and chat requests)
• Following (favorites)
• Carousel posts
• Post comments
• Archiving posts
• Activity (or ‘notifications’) section
• Saving posts
• Reporting users

I’m looking forward to creating more tailored apps for broader use cases, but this one was a lot of fun.

Instagram

[Christophe_HK]

Very nice app, clean and efficient, congrats!

Just one thing : in the profile section, there’s an empty circle tile, as shown in this screenshot :

I love also the About section

[Robert_Petitto]

Looks great. Very polished. Noticed I have a second profile image placeholder.

[Lisa]

Thank you! @Robert_Petitto @Christophe_HK I saw that bug as well. It may have something to do with me adding another column to the 'App: Login" sheet? I used the UNIQUE formula as the source for the user profile emails on my user profile sheet.

I ended up filtering to remove the blank placeholder. Looks like that did the trick.

[Jeff_Hager]

First of all, gorgeous app! I also just want to warn you about using the UNIQUE formula to build a user profile sheet from the app: logins sheet. If any of the data in App: Logins is ever shuffled around or deleted, it’s going to break all of your user profiles because the data in that sheet will be reshuffled and not match up with any other user profile columns you have. I would recommend using Glides built in User Profiles to automatically create a user profile record with email in your user profile sheet.

https://docs.glideapps.com/all/reference/privacy-and-per-user-data/user-profiles

[Lisa]

Thank you @Jeff_Hager! And you’re right, I believe that was causing the issue with the bug.

I’ll need to adjust some things so that user profiles aren’t relying on that formula. Thank you for the resource!

[Nico]

Hey Lisa,

can´t make the direct chat function working.

[Lisa]

Hi Nico, can you share a screenshot? The chat is designed so that the user you want to chat with has to ‘accept’ the chat first. Let me know what bug you’re seeing and I can try to figure what’s going on.

Thanks for testing!

[Stephanie_Bonnet]

Looks lovely. How did you create the about page with those various sub-pages? Also, the private chat seems really interesting, I didn’t see in the help documentation how to create that?

[Lisa]

@Nico, I believe I fixed this bug. Let me know if you can see the requests and pending chats or if you run into a different bug.

[Lisa]

Thank you @Stephanie_Bonnet. I created an “About” sheet with one row for each (legal, policy, etc.). I made that tab a ‘detail’ tab and pulled in the information using an inline list.

For the image, I used the ‘Single value’ function and pulled in an image I have saved on a sheet called ‘UI’ for images and such that have one value that I like to use across the entire app (images, links, etc.)

[Lisa]

For private chat, my approach was creating a ‘chat’ form. By adding ‘comments’ to chats and setting the topic as the ‘chat Id’ , each chat has it’s own set of comments.

Users only see the chats they are added to or created using a filter and visibility conditions.

[Stephanie_Bonnet]

Thank you. I had done this but put the various elements of the about page as “column” instead of rows. I will modify this according to your model.

[sardamit]

Loved playing with this.
Any idea why I see this? Username already taken?

[Robert_Petitto]

I have a messages template in the store that you could use if you wanted to see behind the scenes:
https://www.glideapps.com/templates/GgjCXWmFRfjKpCG3Fs9j-template

[Lisa]

Thanks for testing @sardamit!

That was me playing around with a formula to create an alert for when there’s a duplicate username. Almost worked, but it’s too dependent on Google sheets formula.

I’m looking forward to more advanced Glide formulas so that it can all happen in Glide

[Lucas_Pires]

Awesome job! Loved this clean design, congrats @Lisa

[Lisa]

Thank you @Lucas_Pires

[garrison]

@Robert_Petitto: Your messenger app looks slick, love it!

For our use case, we are looking to enable private chat for when a user is on a specific listing (detail layout) so that instead of looking up users to instigate a private chat, they would click a button on listing which would put them in direct private contact with the person who owns the listing.

Is this doable?

Also, as chats pile up in the sheet, I presume they count as rows and therefore could at some point exceed the row quotas in Glide?

@Lisa: Love your app, and in particular your solution for the about page!

[Robert_Petitto]

Hi Garrison,

Yes, this can be done! In stead of using the user information from the user profile, you’d Use the user info from the listing to create the chat. Since the chat leverages the comments feature, it doesn’t count against row quota. Only one row per chat is used (to house the info connecting one user to the other).